Polands Wojciech Jaruzelski, 90, led crush of Solidarity

Posted: May 26 Updated: Today at 12:04 AM He enjoyed a privileged childhood, endured forced labor, rose in the military and then to power.

By Peter Finn The Washington Post

Wojciech Jaruzelski, the expressionless Polish general behind dark glasses who imposed martial law in 1981 to crush the independent trade union Solidarity and nearly eight years later participated in the negotiated revolution that led to the fall of communism in Poland, died Sunday at a military hospital in Warsaw. He was 90.

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Polands last communist leader, Wojciech Jaruzelski, photographed in 2009, died in a military hospital in Warsaw on Sunday.

The Associated Press

A hospital spokesman announced the death. The general had a stroke this month and had previously been treated for cancer.

Jaruzelski, the scion of landed gentry, was deported to the Soviet Union as a forced laborer in 1941 and returned to Poland later in World War II as a committed communist in the ranks of the Soviet-created Polish First Army.

Starting in the 1950s, he rose rapidly in the military and political establishments of the new Peoples Republic of Poland. After the Soviet-backed governments fall in 1989, Jaruzelskis past was at the center of post-communist debates about historical reckoning and justice.

MOSCOW'S STOOGE, OR PATRIOT?

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Polands Wojciech Jaruzelski, 90, led crush of Solidarity